Plenty of intellectuals said similar decades prior to that. I don’t doubt that Winston Churchill was a very flawed individual. But I use this image on this page, showing him standing in front of cheering crowds on VE Day, because it reflects his moment of vindication. The moment when his greatness was shown to be vastly more significant than his failings. Not only was Britain alone against the Nazis in the summer of 1940, when Northern Ireland shared in that loneliness, Churchill himself had been personally alone for much of the 1930s in his stand against Hitler. Consider the contrast between his judgement and that of that Anglophobic Irish wretch, Eamon de Valera, who paid his personal respects to the German representative in Dublin on news of Hitler’s suicide in April 1945. There is some debate about Churchill’s earliest thoughts on Hitler given that articles he wrote were toned down to suit the Tory government of the mid 1930s but I think it is clear that he quickly spotted Hitler’s evil side. The Nazi leader burned down the Reichstag in early 1933, weeks after he took power. A few weeks later he passed the Enabling Act, using intimidation, turning Germany into a dictatorship almost overnight. By the following year things were becoming clear: in 1934 he murdered – yes butchered – scores of political rivals in the Night of the Long Knives. Let me pause for a moment and acknowledge an interesting thing about human nature: there is a capacity in most of us to park horrifying snippets of information like that. It was done after Vladimir Putin murdered his critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 and when he tried to murder the Russian agent Sergei Skripal on British soil in 2018. The UK did not want a final rupture with the Kremlin dictator after that. The same refusal to face horror was evident after the Saudi regime murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident, in Turkey in 2018 (but how brave was Rory McIlroy later to stand out against the Saudi-funded LIV golf tour). And after the Chinese massacre of students at Tinanmen Square in 1989. Such killings were all almost unbelievable in their callousness yet I think that ever since we have been almost unable to face up to the implications of their horror, given the almost economic necessity of continued dealings with such nations. Likewise with Hitler after 1934. All sorts of leaders, British and American, and not just de Valera, failed to banish any thoughts of Hitler as a civilised leader after that massacre. But by then Churchill was clear in his mind what he was dealing with, calling Hitler “wicked”. There was after that that relentless clues as to Hitler’s nature, above all attacks on Jews on Kristallnacht in late 1938. I don’t even think of the appeasement of Hitler in Munich as a moment of clarity – after all, anyone who was trying to justify to themselves Hitler’s acceptability could still at that stage have believed that he was only trying to seize German speaking territory in Czechoslovakia rather that to dominate Europe. It was more an accumulation of clues. As I say, therefore, de Valera was not alone in his blindness in the 1930s. Others like the former UK prime minister David Lloyd George and the abdicated king Edward VIII were the same. De Valera however stayed blind after the invasion of Poland in 1939, after the fall of France in 1940, after the attempt to destroy Britain later that year, after the blitzes of 1941, including just up the road (happily he helped put out the flames in Belfast). He stayed blind after the deranged invasion of Russia in 1941. After the attack on America by the Nazis’ Japanese ally later that year. After Stalingrad showed that Hitler would sacrifice his own soldiers on a ruinous scale to win the war. And after not only solid reports of German atrocities reached these islands as the war progressed but definitive proof of them emerged as Nazi territory was defeated in early 1945. Or maybe I am wrong to say that he was blind. Maybe he just sympathised with it all. Yet the sort of Irish voices who defend him paying his respects to Hitler, still failing or refusing to see what Churchill had done more than decade before, are the voices who tell us Ireland wasn’t really neutral. Sorry, it was. It was ultimately neutral in the face of the greatest ever existential threat to western freedom and democracy. The older I get the more terrifying I realise it was for Britain in the autumn of 1940. Even if I had merely been a Northern Ireland-based reporter I would have been sick with worry. Churchill had colleagues who wanted him to throw in the towel, and understandably too. But we had at the helm a man who didn’t. Interestingly, he almost met Hitler in Germany before he became leader and even admirers of Churchill are relieved he didn’t. Another common human trait, which Churchill apparently had, is to warm to dodgy people in person, and thereafter be softer on them than we would be if we had never had that personal connection. I feel that much more should have been made of the 80th anniversary of VE Day in NI by both the government and the BBC, including a major, focal point event, akin to what happened in London. But to avoid such sourness for now I savour the thought of how May 8 1945 must in Belfast have seemed the opposite of those bleak, terrifying days, five years previously. The fascinating letter from Bryan Johnston opposite will chime with many readers and reminds me of my own late dad’s clear memories of the Belfast blitz (he was born in 1930 and died three years ago).